The present disclosure relates to a coating device for coating components with a coating agent, more particularly for painting motor vehicle body parts with a paint. Further, the present disclosure relates to a corresponding coating method.
FIG. 1 shows a cross-section view through a conventional painting installation for painting motor vehicle body parts. Here, the motor vehicle body parts to be painted are transported on a conveyor 1 at right angles to the drawing plane through a painting cabin 2, in which the motor vehicle body parts are then painted in the conventional manner by painting robots 3, 4. The painting robots 3, 4 have several swivelling robot arms each of which carry, via a multi-axis robot hand axis, an application device, such as, for example a rotary atomiser, an air atomiser or a so-called airless device.
The drawback of these known application devices is, however, the non-optimal degree of application efficiency, so that part of the sprayed paint, known as overspray, does not land on the motor vehicle body part to be painted and has to be removed from the painting cabin 2 with the cabin air. Above the painting cabin 2 there is therefore a so-called plenum 5 from which air is introduced through a ceiling 6 of the painting cabin 2 downwards in the direction of the arrow into the painting cabin 2. The air from the cabin 2 with the contained overspray then enters a wash-out 7 located under the painting cabin 2 in which the overspray is removed from the cabin air and bonded to water.
This waste water containing the overspray must then be treated again in a laborious process whereby the produced paint sludge constitutes specialist waste which must be disposed of in a correspondingly costly manner.
Furthermore, the air downdraft speed in the painting cabin 2 must be in the range of approx. 0.3-0.5 m/s at least in order to rapidly remove the overspray occurring during painting from the painting cabin 2.
In addition, the overspray occurring during painting can at times and locally produce an explosive atmosphere so that the relevant statutory atmosphere explosible (ATEX) product guidelines must be observed.
On the one hand, due to their unsatisfactory application efficiency and the resulting overspray the known application devices incur high investment costs for the necessary washing out and required explosion protection.
Additionally, due to the overspray occurring during operation, the known application devices are associated with high operating costs through the paint losses and the costs of disposing of the overspray.
The aim of the present disclosure is therefore to bring about an appropriate improvement.